Hi I have this Sql Authentication connection string which has a username and password. I added this connection string to Application Settings and the corresponding app.config item was added to my project automatically. But now that i want to access the app.config file in my codes,ConfigurationSection,ConfigurationManager and other related classes,properties and methods are not available.I read many articles on this subject but i havent been able to do the encryption so far. The other question is wether the encryption needs to be done once or should it be done every time the application runs? Is it be possible to set this encrypted connection as a SqlConnection's connection string or the assignment must be done prior to encryption? please help! thanks